


of kings and princes

by cuimhl



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Emotional Rambling, M/M, post ep 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-09
Updated: 2016-12-09
Packaged: 2018-09-07 11:00:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8798287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/cuimhl
Summary: two winters, one love.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this wasn't even what i wanted to write...i'm sorry

 

They’re surrounded by light, by cold stone and ethereal song. Barcelona, together, early December as the snow falls softly outside.

And yet, even now, all Viktor can see is Yuuri.

Take his mind for a spin, a wander through the woodland of his childhood and - wait, a stumble, hard gravel in his knees and soft hands picking him up from the dust. Nothing mattered then, two arms and two legs to take him where he wanted, twenty-seven winters passing over the curve of his wristbone until the ice drove all the way to the centre of his ribcage.

No, that’s not right. His twenty-seventh winter: press play.

 

 

 

Start from the cold embrace of the rink, a scrape and a twist and he’s home. It could be home. The roar of the crowd is gratifying; Viktor Nikiforov, king of the ice and making history as we speak. Under his blades, the ice trembles with their idolatry, and he basks in it for a beat, two, stop.

They don’t doubt him anymore, claim that they could not possibly have doubted him ever. How do two eyes trained on a solitary figure turning a biellmann spin into art itself, miss the unmissable mark of a genius? No genius at the craft of ice-skating has ever held such a long, seemingly interminable reign over the rink, yet Viktor does it single-handedly.

Ah, they nod to themselves understandingly. Impossible to mistake for anything other than what he is.

But a king tires of his throne, do the fairytales truly fail to mention? All those princesses in their billowing skirts, hands clasped over the balcony looking out to their prince charming mounted in shadow on the horizon; do no stories tell of the king? How Sleeping Beauty’s father, loving her so much, found it in his heart to send away the culmination of his lifelong partnership with the queen? How Snow White’s father, longing for something other than the cold steel of his seat on the dais, sought the comfort of one who never loved him?

Viktor is lonely in his cape and fleur de lys, his beautiful robes and the long hair he cuts for, keep counting, three seconds of surprise rustling among the audience when he arcs the bare nape of his neck over the rink and seeks something other than that same adoration he used to yearn for.

That’s right.

Cue another crown, another latticework of diamond and iron fitting over his brow like a reminder and a warning, _keep it a surprise._ He could win everything and come back, win it all again, and maybe then the mercenaries would be banging at the gate. He would let them in. Let them take it all, just so he could take it from them again; _surprise._

The noise of the party is pleasantly little, polite conversation masked with the bright tinkle of glasses meeting at the lip, of footsteps and long skirts trailing over the carpet. Everyone wants to congratulate him, so Viktor lets them. Basks in the adoration a little longer.

He’s not a good man, Viktor Nikiforov. He wants like any other, works hard like any other, but you either die first or live to see yourself become the antagonist. He’s lived too long in the forced sunlight of this blind idol worship - he can blame himself for a ragged landing off his quadruple flip, a centimetre travelled from his sit spin, but who else can? It might be lethargy breeding in the marrow of his bones like maggots, or it might be something else. He’s not sure he’ll live long enough to find out, under the flash of camera shutters overlooking every twitch of his finger once out of the figure skating season.

Oh, but no one is good. Selfish aims, selfish worship, Viktor owns centrestage and watches it all happen. Hands, reaching for him, not to pick him up from the gravel but to throw more on him, until even the genius is buried six feet under where nothing, let alone himself, can taint his own shining legacy.

That is, until -

Two hands, grasping for him, not to give or to take but to join, “join me in a dance?”

The boy is clearly drunk, stumbling on his feet in the most graceless manner as he knocks back another bottle with summer burning in his cheeks, a wildfire raging in his eyes. He looks right through Viktor like it doesn’t matter who he dances with, and yet out of this sea of people, his gaze still landed on him.

“Alright,” Viktor humours him. He gives him this dance.

 

 

 

He remembers: meeting the gaze of a boy in the deepening night and he looks at him like a stranger.

“A commemorative photo?” he offers with a smile, but the boy turns his back and walks away.

 

 

 

Yet does it matter? Here, where this same boy traces his steps on the carpet like he's drawing gold, charming in his shy, bold, disarming way? The drink turns some into madmen, some into idiots, turns Viktor himself into the senseless, lonely soul that he has pushed into the crevices of his past. But it is so darkly becoming of this one.

Is this why they love him? Is this why they call him a king, just so they can see that spark of cold flint in his eyes ignited in the midst of soaring music, the same way he looks at this boy?

“Katsuki Yuuri,” he slurs an introduction, smiling.

“Viktor-”

“I know,” he laughs. “Come dance.”

Is this the same way that Viktor skates? He can’t look away, can’t hope to avert his eyes from the way that Yuuri holds his stare like he’s daring the gods themselves, challenging them to fight.

Or to dance.

Viktor loves like this. Like one man holding his hand up to the sky, every step prying liberation from the ground, staking gravity against his heels until he is great enough to fly alone. He loves impossible things, like wings for skates, endless skies for taciturn ice, this dancing Katsuki Yuuri.

“If I win the dance off,” Yuuri looks at him and Viktor needs nothing but this, “If I win the dance off, be my coach.”

He could agree to anything if Yuuri asked it of him.

 

 

 

Or so he thought, until he finds no such person awaiting his reply the next morning.

Gone, like he was never here.

Viktor is used to making and breaking promises within heartbeats, but not to being left, like this.

Something greater than just disappointment alone clenches his heart and he has to stop, has to wonder, what he’s going to tell the journalists when they ask him again.

“What do you have planned for the next season?”

_How are you going to keep surprising us?_

 

 

 

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

 

 

 

Out of the blue, the video takes his heart in hand and pulls, like it’s asking, something, something -

So Viktor listens.

 

 

 

Katsuki Yuuri is so different this time that they meet, his eyes skittering as soon as Viktor catches him looking, like a prey and predator engaged in an unwilling dance. He also burns with the cold and brittle embers of a fire half snuffed out, locking the golden conflagration of his grand and indomitable brilliance within the battlecage of his chest and hiding the key.

Viktor can’t be sure what exactly he’s looking for until he finds it, trusting only that Yuuri has kept it and not let it go. He usually prides himself on reading people well - finding the perfect turn of phrase to silence probing questions, enchanting the entire skating world - but he cannot read Yuuri.

It fascinates him. It frustrates him. But more than anything else, it is still the way that Yuuri looks at him with eyes that trust and a heart that beats against his prison that keeps him here, keeps him waiting for that unnameable thing that drew him here in the first place.

He imagined going back to the ice as a performer, to dip and turn and leap for that deafening applause, but now he finds it so, so empty. That life has hardly an inch on the joy with which Yuuri’s face turns, the disappointment that burdens him, the determination that never quite goes out.

Viktor doesn’t bow to anyone, but he’s about to bow to this.

“Don’t look away from me,” Yuuri stares him down. Viktor’s heart stills mid-beat and he stares back, _how can I?_

 

 

 

“Just stand by my side,” he implores. He asks for so little. Viktor would give him the world if he wanted it; Viktor would give  _everything_.

“Be my coach until I retire,” he demands -

(asks, wonders, hands tight against his shoulders like he’s afraid of letting him go)

\- “I wish you’d never retire,” Viktor replies with a smile, and thinks his heart has never felt so full.

 

 

 

Because just as kings seek a life other than their own, so princes would dream of both kinghood and young love in their earlier years. Viktor did not believe in having both; he believes it now.

No applause compares to this: choreography folded by his own two hands, a boy who skates like wildfire on the ice, something wonderful and intrepid that Viktor has never seen before but has always been dreaming of. He never asked for the glory, the crowns. He never asked for Katsuki Yuuri.

And yet, as the crisp white wonderland of his twenty-seventh winter turns its attention to the unassuming wildflower blooming in his heart, Viktor is seized by a shock of inspiration.

He isn’t called willful or dramatic for nothing. The hunger for fighting scorches through his veins and this is what he sees in Yuratchka, this is what he seeks to put out before it burns through him whole. This is also what he finds in Yuuri, but instead of consuming him in its entirety, Yuuri fights both his own and Viktor’s demons without hesitation.

Everyone who has ever promised Viktor anything has fallen subservient to his own will. Only Yuuri defies his wishes, does unnecessary jumps during the warm up and collapses on an unplanned quad flip and kisses him like it’s burning him to do so but he’ll do it anyway.

Who cares if he’s hidden the key to his heart?

It’s as if anyone believed he could conceal himself from the beginning. No flame remains unknown for long. If it starves enough for the light, it will burn and it will destroy, Icarus flying too close to the sun just for a taste of the glorious impossible.

Viktor could burn for it, but Yuuri will not.

 

 

 

His twenty-eighth winter is different from any other; not for your reasons, not for mine. It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when he besieged Yuuri’s heart and bid him lower his defenses, but the openness with which he looks back at Viktor as if he’s his whole world as he slides the ring on his finger, is maybe what Viktor has been looking for.

Perhaps it’s too early to say.

Yet, why does his heart sing like so?

 


End file.
